I got an email recently from a student studying Mandarin Chinese at a well known "School of Higher Language Learning" in the US. The heart of the student's email to me was that she is constantly getting ridiculed by her Mandarin Chinese teacher for not "Sounding like a native." The student said that this teacher would say things like "Yeh, OK.., but you don't sound like a native." Well, has this "teacher" ever sat down and figured out that the student doesn't sound like a "native" because, well …she isn't. I'm sure this will ring a few bells from some and whistles from others. First of all, I think one needs to sit back and define what a native Mandarin Chinese speaker should sound like.

I had an enlightening conversation with a few expat friends this weekend. The topic of discussion was why we came to China or Taiwan"Taiwan" is also commonly used to refer to the area under the jurisdiction of the Republic of China (ROC) government, not to be confused with the People's Republic of China government. Following World War II, the ROC gained control of Taiwan from the Japanese in 1945, but lost control of mainland China to the Chinese Communist Party four years later in 1949 as a result of the Chinese Civil War. The Kuomintang (KMT) government then retreated to the island and moved the capital to Taipei. While the People's Republic of China (PRC) claims Taiwan as its province, the PRC has never controlled Taiwan. The main island of Taiwan, also known as Formosa (from Portuguese (Ilha) Formosa, meaning "beautiful (island)"), is located in East Asia off the coast of China, southwest of the main islands of Japan but directly west of the end of Japan's Ryukyu Islands, and north-northwest of the Philippines. It is bound to the east by the Pacific Ocean, to the south by the South China Sea and the Luzon Strait, to the west by the Taiwan Strait and to the north by the East China Sea. The island is 394 kilometers (245 miles) long and 144 kilometers (89 miles) wide and consists of steep mountains covered by tropical and subtropical vegetation.
Though for decades following the Chinese Civil War, the ROC was politically a single-party authoritarian state, the ROC has since evolved into a democracy in Asia. Its rapid economic growth in the decades after World War II and the government's relocation to Taiwan has brought it to an advanced economy status as one of the Four Asian Tigers. This economic rise is known as the Taiwan Miracle. It is categorized as an advanced economy by the IMF and high-income economy by the world bank. Its technology industry plays a key role in the global economy. Taiwanese companies manufacture a giant portion of the world's consumer electronics.. Most of us wondered how friends and family "back home" viewed us living and working here. First we focused on why we came. Most of us came to the conclusion that something what I'll call "cultural mysteries" lead us to wonder in this direction.